Year-End Holiday Chores and Rituals

As we head into another round of year-end holidays, my daily routine is gradually becoming monopolized by the seasonal tasks and activities I undertake at this time of year with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Excitement because I’ve always loved celebrating these holidays, trepidation because I sometimes get a bit carried away and there are moments when I notice I’m feeling more exhausted than festive!

Back in 2001 when, finding myself again in the throes of trying to get a handle on how to minimize the stress of preparing for the holidays, I created two checklists to help me more efficiently navigate what amounts to the entire month of December. I tried to identify all my self-imposed annual holiday chores, plus a separate list of holiday rituals that I particularly enjoy. I had to use a really tiny font to get those two checklists onto a single page, but I managed! Recently I unearthed a copy of this document and thought it would be interesting to post them here as a sort of index to the way I typically go about celebrating the holiday season.

Two things have changed in my life since I created those checklists fifteen years ago – two things, I mean, in addition to the still-rather-recent but clearly relevant fact that as a retiree I have so much more time for everything, including the past four annual cycles of holiday-related chores and pleasures!

The two changes since I first compiled my checklists:

I’ve re-framed (for myself, anyway) what I’m celebrating. After gradually realizing I prefer to celebrate the annual change of seasons rather than the birthday of someone who many revere as the Savior of Mankind, I have tried to deliberately de-Christianize the objects I use to decorate my house for these holidays. I also have made progress on trying to de-commercialize my holiday festoonery, getting rid of most of the Santy Clausey ornaments, etc. (I have hung onto a few non-Americanized “Father Christmas” things.) These two decisions resulted in my jettisoning several bins worth of decorations I’d hauled down from my attic every year for decades to mark the season, while preserving (and seeking out additional) images and symbols that are more evocative of references to the Winter Solstice. For example, I still love the idea of bringing a tree into the house, and I like using lots of candlelight the final week of December.

I have tried to simplify my year-end house decorating, food preparing, and gift-giving activities. I like to think that one day I’ll be content with merely setting out a few bowls full of ornaments and serving my visitors only cheese and crackers along with their cups of tea every December – but as anyone who knows me well could tell you, I’m not quite there yet.

Aside from my determination to de-commercialize, de-Christianize, and de-complicate my celebration of the end of the year, there are many things I love about the way most of my friends and family celebrate the year-end holidays:

the more-festive-than-usual gatherings of families, friends, and neighbors – although, for me, the smaller those gatherings, the more I tend to enjoy them.

the seasonal decorations (especially the ones that aren’t religion-themed).

the exchanging of greeting cards and/or gifts and the bonds and the acknowledgement of fondness and gratitude that these rituals represent.

most of the traditional foods and beverages.

some of the traditional seasonal music. Not the inane stuff that relentlessly assault the ears of the hapless customers of most retail establishments, mind you, but a handful of the traditional carols (especially Celtic-inflected instrumental versions) and the classical pieces.

Despite my ongoing efforts to simplify the hoopla I put myself through to make December more visibly festive than other months of the year, I was surprised to notice that I continue to look forward to undertaking many of the tasks and activities appearing on my fifteen year old holiday checklists. I probably shouldn’t be surprised: even though I’ve morphed and tweaked my holiday routines to make them more consistent with my beliefs and less stressful to carry out, I’ve always liked the notion of seasonal festivals, and I am notoriously sentimental.

At any rate, I’m reproducing here updated versions of the aforementioned year-end seasonal checklists partly as an acknowledgement of how enthusiastically I immerse myself in the seasonal madness (or what I consider to be its most positive aspects), partly out of curiosity at how many of the items on these lists will disappear from the lists over the next fifteen years, and partly in case the checklists might be useful to someone else who finds checklists immensely useful in minimizing stressful undertakings!

The photos of some of my holiday house decorations that I’m including below were taken at various different Christmases/Solstices Past – some of them in houses or apartments where I lived before moving to McLendon Avenue in 1993.

Checklist #1: Cal’s Year-End Holiday Chores

Decorating

 bring down from the attic the dozen bins of holiday festoonery

 sort through each bin to decide what to use this year (and what to discard)

 return the dozen empty bins to the attic until after the holidays

 buy  set up  decorate the tree

 arrange presents, extra ornaments, fruit, etc. under the tree

 obtain evergreens to use throughout the house

 buy a sufficient supply of votive and pillar candles to minimize the need for electric lights when visitors come to call during the holidays

 Unearth the presents I’ve bought throughout the year for specific people, and wrapping them

 Formulate a series of shopping trips, preferably to non-chain stores, for purchasing as-yet-unpurchased gifts; time those trips to minimize exposure to traffic or parking nightmares and to blaring Xmas carols

 Take time while I’m wrapping each gift to think about the person whose gift I’m wrapping

 Schedule a visit with my friend Kris to the cabin in North Georgia to address our holiday cards and consider doing some holiday baking

 Eagerly anticipate the ritual of receiving, opening, reading, and displaying the holiday cards people mail to me

 Reflect on my gratitude for relationships past and present with friends and family alive and not alive

 Invite my friends to the house (individually or in groups) for a candlelit tea-drinking salute to the Winter Solstice

 Listen by candlelight to a recording of poet Dylan Thomas reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales or re-watching John Huston’s movie version of James Joyce’s short story The Dead (set at Christmas in Dublin in the early 1900s)

 Be startled by walking into a room with a tree in it

 Gaze at the indoor tree and enjoy the resulting trance state

 Set aside at least one evening in late December for driving through nearby neighborhoods looking at outdoor decorations

 Try to finishing all my holiday chores – including all giftwrapping – early enough to relax and enjoy a completely chore-free evening on December 24th

 Join the other Goughs (and assorted others) for the family’s Xmas Morning traditions: being together, munching down on mom’s sausage balls before opening the presents, emptying out our Xmas stockings, savoring the mincemeat pie, etc.

 Escape the city to spend an exquisitely calm New Year’s Eve in a cozy cabin in the middle of the woods in the mountains of North Georgia

If you happen to enjoy certain holiday rituals or seasonal pleasures that aren’t mentioned in Checklist #2, please consider mentioning them in a comment to this blogpost. I’m always hoping to incorporate additional ways to enjoy the holidays, and you might have found some I haven’t discovered yet!

Thank you for reading my blogpost! Yes, please do send me one of your holiday cards: I’ll be adding the envelope (!) to my collection of cards that dates back to the 1960s!

I am planning on being in Blue Ridge for the week or so after Xmas Day, so perhaps we can arrange a visit: I’d love to see your cabin and would love for y’all to see ours. My phone (which doesn’t ring reliably, so leave a voicemail, please) is 404-377-0476.

From Cal’s Commonplace Book

The Constant Reader

Books Read This Year

Updated February 20, 2019

“I continue to think of myself as someone who is essentially a reader—a man who takes a deep pleasure in good books, who views reading as a fine mode of acquiring experience, and who still brings the highest expectations to what he reads. By the highest expectations I mean that I am perhaps a naïve person who has never ceased to believe that books can change his life, and decisively so.” – Joseph Epstein (from Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives [1989], quoted by Patrick Kurp at his blog Anecdotal Evidence)

JUST FINISHED:

Asymmetry (2018) by Lisa Halliday

I read this award-winning debut novel for my book club. The book is devoted to two different sets of characters (and two different settings). Halliday is an excellent writer, but I couldn’t find myself caring too much about the fate of the main characters in the first story (involving a Manhattan-based novelist and his much younger mistress). The second set of characters (an Iraqi-American and his family and acquaintances) were also drawn very vividly, but what I appreciated the most about this part of the book was Halliday’s skillful insertion of the horrific damage caused to civilians by the U.S. government’s imperialistic venture in Iraq. The third part of the novel (an interview with the novelist featured in the first part of Asymmetry) seemed tacked on and unnecessary. I’d recommend this author, but not this book.

CURRENTLY READING (in addition to trying to keep up with the most recent issues of the planet’s two best magazines, The Sun and the New Yorker):

A Southern Garden (1942) by Elizabeth Lawrence

As William James Said: Extracts from the Published Writings of William James (1942) edited by Elizabeth Perkins Aldrich

BOOKS FINISHED EARLIER THIS YEAR:

An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town(2009) by David Farley

I ran across this book at a recent library book sale, and am so glad I did. Part travel diary, part detective story, part history, it has two things bound to capture my interest: it’s a chronicle of an American living for a year in a tiny Italian hilltop town for a year, intermingled with a dogged quest for understanding (and locating) a notorious holy relic. Who knew that the fervent veneration of Jesus’s circumcised foreskin (yes, you read that correctly!) had such a long and interesting career? Farley’s sense of humor and his scrupulous scholarship, together make this a delightful romp of a book – and a thoroughly entertaining case study of the absurdity (and lucrativeness) of religious cults. And I was happy to see, in Farley’s notes, his reference to another Italy-themed travelog I enjoyed reading years ago, Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the history of the World (2007).

In the Morning: Reflections from First Light (2006) by Philip Lee Williams

Like me, this book’s author is a “morning person.” Unlike me, he writes about his early morning walks, and this book is a sampling of the thoughts that those pre-dawn walks have provoked over the years. Williams is both a poet and a science writer, and his ruminations show that fact. Williams lives about 90 miles from where I do, so that was an added plus in my enjoyment of these essays.

Somewhere Near the End: A Memoir (2009) by Diana Athill

By happy coincidence, the same week that one of my author heroines, Diana Athill, died (at age 101), I discovered that I’d at some point purchased – but never got around to starting – a copy of Somewhere Near the End, now over eight years old. I eagerly plucked it from my bookshelf and spent most of the next three days devouring it. The adjectives in the blurbs excerpted from the book’s reviews are, for once, are spot-on: “remorseless and tender,” “a wisdom more ambient than aphoristic,” “refreshingly candid,” “fiercely intelligent…and never dull,” “unflinching,” “deals with growing old with bravery, humor and honesty,” “prose as clear and graceful as ever,” “brilliant; entirely lacking in the usual regrets [and] nostalgia.” “as unalarmed by the prospect of death as by the seeming meaninglessness of the universe,” “her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting”, “bracingly frank…joyful rather than grim.’ Or, to use the description supplied by the organization that gave this book its annual award for biography: “candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and, above all, beautifully, beautifully written.” If I were ever to embark on any writing project myself, I would aim to write with the precision, the honesty, and the humility of Diana Athill.

Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World(1988; updated 1997) by Tom Cowan

Brief and straightforward biographical sketches of over 40 lesbians and gay men who enriched the fields of art, literature, theater, music, science, social science, or philosophy. A bit like spending time reading a series of Wikipedia entries, I was often surprised at the author’s ability to clearly express why he’d chosen these particular worthies over the ones he omitted. In any case, I learned – in almost every bio – something new (to me) and important about celebrities I (mistakenly) thought I already knew a fair amount about.

Ultimate Questions (2016) by Brian Magee

I am not familiar with the Britain-based Magee’s earlier works, but am so glad he wrote this one and so glad I found it. (His earlier book, ThePhilosophy of Schopenhauer will be the next book by Magee that I will track down). One reviewer wrote about this book: “Magee writes clearly, without jargon, and he makes his case for profound agnosticism with considerable force.” Exactly so; in fact, this is probably the single most compelling book of modern philosophy I have ever read. It’s also one of the most eloquent and least pompous books of philosophy I have ever read. This is a book I will buy a copy of for the sheer pleasure of re-reading its arrestingly clear (and mostly irrefutable) sentences.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018) by James Clear

This book’s bringing together of what scientists and psychologists know about habit formation (the making of new ones, the breaking of old ones) is not only useful, but entertainingly presented. Because of the author’s engaging style and his incorporation of findings from multiple post-behaviorism fields (like neurolinguistic programming), it took a while for me to realize that the book is largely a recapitulation of what I’d learned in college (50 years ago!) about operant conditioning. Still, there were things about how habits are formed and how they persist that I needed to be reminded of, especially some of the counter-intuitive features of habit formation, and I am using some of the author’s tips to create some better habits in 2019 – and to get rid of a few undesirable ones.